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Twitter Tuesday - this week's Twitter news, apps and more
Happy birthday, Twitter! Four years ago, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sent out the very first tweet: "just setting up my twttr." Fast forward to today, when even having a million followers doesn't make you a bigshot anymore. We'll tell you all about that, as well as some new apps and changes to the Twitter API, in this edition of Twitter Tuesday.
Here we go!
ReadWriteWeb just reported on a study that proves having a million followers doesn't necessarily make you influential. Researchers crunched an astounding amount of Twitter data -- almost 2 billion tweets! -- and determined that only around 6 million of the 80 million accounts they checked were active. So, you may have a million followers, but only a small percentage of those will listen to what you say, and even fewer will retweet and mention you.
Speaking of "influence," it's going to start affecting Twitter search results, which are about to get more relevant or turn into a useless popularity contest, depending on your point of view. Currently the Twitter API includes one way of sorting tweets: by most recent. A new way of sorting -- by "most popular" -- will bring results from more popular (and ostensibly more relevant) users to the top. This might reduce the amount of spam you see in your search results, especially for trending topics, but it could also make real-time results less interesting. We'll have to wait and see.
Earlier this week on Download Squad, Erez wrote about a service called SleepingTime, which scans users' tweets to determine their typical sleep schedules. Sure, this has potential as a stalking tool, but it could also be useful if you need to know when the best time to call someone might be. Some of my friends have odd sleep schedules, and plenty of them live on other continents, so it doesn't hurt to know when they're going to be online.
What's the best URL shortener to use on Twitter? A web monitoring company took a look at a bunch of popular shorteners, finding that Google's goo.gl was the fastest and had the best uptime, while Facebook's fb.me was the slowest and least reliable. Everyone else fell somewhere in the middle. You can read the report for more detailed data that might help you pick a shortener.
Meanwhile, Twitter's launched its own shortener, Twt.tl, but it's only available in direct messages so far, and it's very limited. Watch for it to corner the market if it's ever rolled out in a big way.
Well, that's all the time we have for Twitter Tuesday this week. Thanks for reading, and don't forget to tune in next week for more Twitter news, all in one convenient location!
